"Perfectly killing," said everybody.

This shocking exhibition of bad manners had not gone on very long before I became aware that it was being improvised for my benefit.

After Alma had admitted that the Bishop was a "great flirt" of hers, and Mr. Vivian, amid shouts of laughter, had christened him her "crush," she turned to me and said, with her smiling face slightly drawn down on one side:

"Mary, my love, you will certainly agree that your islanders who do not eat cushags, poor dears, are the funniest people alive as guests."

"Not funnier," I answered, "than the people who laugh at them as hosts."

It was not easy to laugh at that, so to cover Alma's confusion the men turned the talk to their usual topic, horses and dogs, and I heard a great deal about "laying on the hounds," which culminated in a rather vulgar story of how a beater who "wasn't nippy on his pins" had been "peppered from behind," whereupon he had "bellowed like a bull" until "soothed down by a sov."

I cannot say how long the talk would have continued in this manner if old Mrs. Lier, addressing herself to me, had not struck a serious subject.

It was about Alma's dog, which was dead. The poor wheezy, spaniel had died in the course of the cruise, though what the cause of its death was nobody knew, unless it had been fretting for its mistress during the period of quarantine which the absurd regulations of government had required on our return from abroad.

The dog having died at sea, I presumed it had been buried there, but no, that seemed to shock the company as an unfeeling supposition. The ship's carpenter had made a coffin for it--a beautiful one of mahogany with a plate-glass inset at the head, and a gilt-lettered inscription below, giving the dog's name, Prue, and its age, three.

In this condition it had been brought ashore, and was now lying in a kind of state in Alma's dressing-room. But to-morrow it was to be buried in the grounds, probably in the glen, to which the company, all dressed in black, were to follow in procession as at a human funeral.

I was choking with anger and horror at the recital of these incredible arrangements, and at the close of it I said in a clear, emphatic voice:

"I must ask you to be good enough not to do that, please."

"Why not, my dear?" said Alma.

"Because I do not wish and cannot permit it," I answered.

There was an awkward pause after this unexpected pronouncement, and when the conversation was resumed my quick ears (which have not always added to my happiness) caught the half-smothered words:

"Getting a bit sidey, isn't she?"

Nevertheless, when I rose to leave the dining-room, Alma wound her arm round my waist, called me her "dear little nun," and carried me off to the hall.

There we sat about the big open fire, and after a while the talk became as free, as it often is among fashionable ladies of a certain class.

Mr. Eastcliff's Camilla told a slightly indelicate anecdote of a "dresser" she had had at the theatre, and then another young woman (the same who "adored the men who went to the deuce for a woman") repeated the terms of an advertisement she had seen in a Church newspaper: "A parlour-maid wants a situation in a family where a footman is kept."

The laughter which followed this story was loud enough, but it was redoubled when Alma's mother, from the depths of an arm-chair, said, with her usual solemnity, that she "didn't see nothing to laugh at" in that, and "the pore girl hadn't no such thought as they had."

Again I was choking with indignation, and in order to assert myself once for all I said:

"Ladies, I will ask you to discontinue this kind of conversation. I don't like it."

At last the climax came.

About ten days after Martin left me I received a telegram, which had been put ashore at Southampton, saying, "Good-bye! God bless you!" and next day there came a newspaper containing an account of his last night at Tilbury.

He had given a dinner to a number of his friends, including his old commander and his wife, several other explorers who happened to be in London, a Cabinet Minister, and the proprietor of the journal which had promoted his expedition.

They had dined in the saloon of the "Scotia" (how vividly I remembered it!), finishing up the evening with a dance on deck in the moonlight; and when the time came to break up, Martin had made one of his sentimental little speeches (all heart and not too much grammar), in which he said that in starting out for another siege of the South Pole he "couldn't help thinking, with a bit of a pain under the third button of his double-breasted waistcoat, of the dear ones they were leaving behind, and of the unknown regions whither they were tending where dancing would be forgotten."

I need not say how this moved me, being where I was, in that uncongenial company; but by some mischance I left the paper which contained it on the table in the drawing-room, and on going downstairs after breakfast next morning I found Alma stretched out in a rocking-chair before the fire in the hail, smoking a cigarette and reading the report aloud in a mock heroic tone to a number of the men, including my husband, whose fat body (he was growing corpulent) was shaking with laughter.

It was as much as I could do to control an impulse to jump down and flare out at them, but, being lightly shod, I was standing quietly in their midst before they were aware of my presence.

"Ah," said Alma, with the sweetest and most insincere of her smiles, "we were just enjoying the beautiful account of your friend's last night in England."

"So I see," I said, and, boiling with anger underneath, I quietly took the paper out of her hand between the tips of my thumb and first finger (as if the contamination of her touch had made it unclean) and carried it to the fire and burnt it.

This seemed to be the end of all things. The tall Mr. Eastcliff went over to the open door and said:

"Deuced fine day for a motor drive, isn't it?"

That gentleman had hitherto shown no alacrity in establishing the truth of Alma's excuse for the cruise on the ground of his visit to "his friend who had taken a shoot in Skye;" but now he found himself too deeply interested in the Inverness Meeting to remain longer, while the rest of the party became so absorbed in the Perth and Ayr races, salmon-fishing on the Tay, and stag-shooting in the deer-forests of Invercauld, that within a week thereafter I had said good-bye to all of them.

All save Alma.

I was returning from the hall after the departure of a group of my guests when Alma followed me to my room and said:

"My dear, sweet girl, I want you to do me the greatest kindness."

She had to take her mother to New York shortly; but as "that dear old dunce" was the worst of all possible sailors, it would be necessary to wait for the largest of all possible steamers, and as the largest steamers sailed from Liverpool, and Ellan was so near to that port, perhaps I would not mind ... just for a week or two longer... .

What _could_ I say? What I did say was what I had said before, with equal weakness and indiscretion, but less than equal danger. A word, half a word, and almost before it was spoken, Alma's arms were about my neck and she was calling me her "dearest, sweetest, kindest friend in the world."

My maid Price was present at this interview, and hardly had Alma left the boudoir when she was twitching at my arm and whispering in my ear:

"My lady, my lady, don't you see what the woman wants? She's watching you."

SEVENTY-THIRD CHAPTER

My husband was the next to go.

He made excuse of his Parliamentary duties. He might be three or four weeks away, but meantime Alma would be with me, and in any case I was not the sort of person to feel lonely.

Never having heard before of any devotion to his duty as a peer, I asked if that was all that was taking him to London.

"Perhaps not all," he answered, and then, with a twang of voice and a twitch of feature, he said:

"I'm getting sick of this God-forsaken place, and then ... to tell you the truth, your own behaviour is beginning to raw me."

With my husband's departure my triumphal course seemed to come to a close. Left alone with Alma, I became as weak and irresolute as before and began to brood upon Price's warning.

My maid had found a fierce delight in my efforts to assert myself as mistress in my husband's house, but now (taking her former advantage) she was for ever harping upon my foolishness in allowing Alma to remain in it.